“My stomach is already in knots thinking about the next school year and thinking about what hurdles we will have going on this year,” said author Penny Williams, whose 12-year-old son has ADHD.

Barb Trader, executive director of TASH, a nonprofit group that advocates for people with disabilities, said “handcuffing a child can lead to re-traumatization and can result in PTSD”. But these incidents are “far more common than we’d like to know”, she said.

Restraining and secluding students is protected by federal law, and an investigation by ProPublica and NPR showed that such incidents happened in schools more than 267,000 times in the 2012 school year. Of these students, three-quarters had either physical, emotional or intellectual disabilities.

The Children’s Law Center and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) are suing the Kenton County sheriff’s department and officer Sumner, saying he and the department acted in violation of state and federal law by restraining the child, and a nine-year-old girl in the same school district, with handcuffs.

Charles Korzenborn, the sheriff in Covington, Kentucky, responded to the charges by saying that the officer had been called in after school hours: “After school administrators’ efforts to de-escalate and defuse a threat to others had proven unsuccessful.”

Instead of resorting to such measures, Trader urged communities to obtain training on understanding the children they are working with on a daily basis.

“School culture is key in this regard … Children need to be taught what is expected of them and teachers [and others] shouldn’t resort to harsh discipline,” Trader added. She argued that teachers have not been given adequate tools to deal with children with ADHD and as a result “tend to implement harsh discipline. This is a culture issue and we must be nurturing so children in these positions don’t feel constantly threatened.”

Williams, who lives in North Carolina, enrolled her son in a new school for the upcoming school year because of problems they had with teachers and administrators at his last school, which she filed a formal complaint against.

Williams described an experience – shared by other parents and adults who had ADHD as children – of children being told that they are lazy, not meeting their potential and being defiant.

“We’ve heard ‘He’s smart so we know he can do fill in the blank,’ a million times,” Williams said.

Children with ADHD have a more difficult time concentrating and are prone to impulsivity. The condition has been diagnosed in 8.8% of children between the ages of 4 and 17, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And according to Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Kentucky has the highest rate of ADHD cases in children, with nearly 15% of school-age youth suffering from the illness.

At one point, Williams brought her son’s private therapist to the school to explain to educators why he needed a more individualized learning model. But after four or five months of trying to explain why that wasn’t the case, she decided he needed to switch schools. “We have struggled in one way or another no matter what school he went to,” Williams said.

Kristen Mae, a writer with AbandoningPretense.com and mother of an ADHD child, said the constant attacks on children are not having the desired impact.

“Parents shouldn’t have to deal with this sort of thing and people need to know how negatively these traumas can impact development in children.”

Mae is hopeful that the publicity from case on a national level could increase awareness about raising children with ADHD.

“It is really sad that this has happened, and it shows an overall lack of education as a major part of the problem, but more people have become aware of this now, so maybe that is one good thing that has come out of it,” Mae said.

This article was amended on 26 May 2016 to correct the name of the website Kristen Mae writes for. It is AbandoningPretense.com, not AbandoningPresence.com.